Blogs at Penn State Community

The following options are available to instructors using both the ANGEL Course Mangement System and the Blogs at Penn State who wish to create links between the two tools.

Option 1 - Link to Blog in ANGEL

The easiest option is to create a Link in ANGEL to your blog in either the Lessons Tab or the Communicate Tab to your Blog. See the ANGEL Help & Information Page for more detailed instructions.
Note: Cookies are required to view dymanic ANGEL Help Documents.

Option 2 - Create Headline Feed in ANGEL

You can use the Feed2JS utility hosted at Penn State Education Technology Services to create JavaScript Code which will display the contents of your blog news feed within ANGEL

Find Subscription Feed

1. Open the public version of your blog.
2. Look for the Subscribe to this blog's feed link in one your sidebars.
3. Right click on the link and copy the link location or URL.
   Note: Make sure the link ends with a .xml extension.

Create JavaScript Code

1. In a new browser window, open http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/feeds/build.php
2. Paste the feed link in the URL field.
3. Select appropriate display options for the Show Channel field.
4. To display all entries, leave Number of Items to Display set to "0". Change the number only if you want only the first few entries.
5. Select appropriate options for Show/Hide Item descriptions.
6. Select Yes for Use HTML in item display. This will preserve the formatting of your blog entry.
7. Select appropriate option for Show Item posting date?
8. Leave Time Zone Offset set to "feed" or some other appropriate value.
   Note: For Pennsylvania, the value is -5 for Daylight Standard and -4 for Daylight Savings.
9. Select appropriate setting for Target links in the new window.
10. Check the option for use UTF-8 Character encoding. This will ensure that "exotic characters" are correctly displayed.
11. Check Yes for Podcast Enclosures.
12. Scroll to the top of the page and click the Generate JavaScript button. This will open a new window.
13. Copy the JavaScript code into a Word or text document. It begins with a <script> tag and ends with a </noscript> tag. See example code below.
    

    <script language="JavaScript" src="http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/feeds/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.personal.psu.edu%2Fxyz123%2Fblogs%2Fmyblog%2Findex.xml&amp;chan=y&amp;date=y&amp;utf=y&amp;html=a" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <noscript>
    
      <a href="http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/feeds/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.personal.psu.edu%2Fxyz123%2Fblogs%2Fmyblog%2Findex.xml&amp;chan=y&amp;date=y&amp;utf=y&amp;html=y">View RSS feed</a>
    </noscript>
    
    

Feeding Headlines into ANGEL

Headlines can be posted in any tool which allows you to switch between Smart Text and HTML formats including Announcements, the Syllabus Editor and pages in the Lessons Tab. This demo will use the ANGEL Page tool.

1. Create an Announcement in ANGEL under the Communicate Tab. See the ANGEL Help & Information Guide for full documentation.
2. Paste the JavaScript code generated in the step above into the Announcement field.
3. Change the Format menu from Smart Text to HTML Text.
4. Set the End Date for some date after the semester ends or else the announcement will disappear.
5. Save the announcement. When the students view the announcement, the headlines will be displayed. The headlines will update themselves as you add entries to your blog.

Headlines will be displayed in the Announcements area for the course and in the My Announcements nugget in each students personal profile.